The humane, and I hope I may be counted among the number, have long wished that some milder arbitrament than that of arms might intervene to settle the disagreements of men.  No such arbitrament has as yet come into being.  We settle our disputes in this way, and history must record the struggles, however reluctantly.  As an historical writer, it has been my function to deal with times of conflict in various periods and lands.  When I was seventy years old I began writing a history of our Civil War.  To have at hand the literature of the period I went to Washington, where the most kind officials of the Library of Congress assigned to me a roomy alcove in the north curtain with a desk and ample surrounding shelves.  These were filled for me by expert hands with whatever I might require for my task, and a screen shut off my corner from the corridor through which at times perambulated Roosevelt, and other secluded delvers, intent on early Gaelic literature and what not.  Here I spent the most of two years, finding it an ideal spot, but my task required more than an examination, under the quiet light of my great window, of books and documents.  The fields themselves must also be surveyed, so I travelled far until I had visited the scene of nearly every important conflict and traced the lines of march in the great campaigns.  I was already a haunter of old battle-fields, that thread of heredity, from a line of forbears very martial in their humble way, asserting itself in whatever lands I wandered.  I had been at Hastings, and had traced the Ironsides to Marston Moor and Naseby.  I had stood by the Schweden-Stein at Luetzen, and tramped the sod of Leipsic and Waterloo.  It was for me now to see our own fields of decision, fields ennobled by a courage as great and a purpose as high as soldiers have ever shown.

To mark Waterloo the Belgians reared a mound of huge dimensions, scraping the terrain far and near to obtain the earth.  Wellington is said to have remarked that the features of the ground had been so far obliterated by this that he could not recognise his own positions.  One wonders whether the future may not blame our generation for transformations almost as disguising.  Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Vicksburg, and Shiloh are now elaborate parks.  No mounds have been reared, but the old roads are smooth boulevards, trim lawns are on the ragged heights, the landscape-gardener has barbered the grim rough face of the country-side into something very handsome no doubt, but the imagination must be set to work to call back the arena as it was on the battle-day.  From various points of vantage memorials make appeal, statues, obelisks, Greek temples, and porches, bewildering in their number, and now and then making doubtful claims.  “This general,” some scrutiniser will tell you, “never held the line ascribed to him and that pompous pile falsely does honour to troops who really wavered in the crisis.”  I know I run counter to prevailing